The North Bay/North Coast’s member of Congress, Jared Huffman, is a big winner from the Democrats’ “blue wave.” With the House of Representatives’ leadership switching from Republican Paul Ryan to Democrat Nancy Pelosi, Huffman is slated to become chairman of the Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans.

The subcommittee has broad authority, including generation of electric power from federal water projects, apportionment of interstate waters, irrigation and reclamation projects, Indian water rights, management of commercial and recreational fisheries, protection of coastal and marine environments, the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, oversight of much of Antarctica and international programs for the protection of the environment.

This subcommittee chairmanship will make Huffman one of the most powerful environmentalists in Congress.

Expect the San Rafael Democrat to hold his seat for decades. Unlike some House members, he doesn’t have unrealistic ambitions for “higher office.” Like all successful representatives, Huffman knows that the way to build power in Washington, D.C. and to direct public policy is to be a House lifer. His longtime stated goal is to move through the chairs to ultimately chair the full Natural Resources Committee, a truly powerful post. That’s the definition of a front bencher.

Huffman has a lock on the solidly blue 2nd Congressional District, stretching from the Golden Gate to the Oregon line. The only blocks of Republicans left in the 2nd district are in economically struggling and underpopulated Del Norte and Humboldt counties. Even in the far north, the conservative business community isn’t interested in less government. What they want is federal infrastructure money to rebuild their highways and ports.

What little opposition Huffman faces comes from the political left, who regard him as too willing to compromise. Certainly his decisive role in the Point Reyes “cow war” preserving West Marin’s historic family ranches and sustainable agriculture made enemies among green militants. Even worse to them, the deal was fashioned via a bipartisan compromise with a Utah Republican.

Marin’s congressman is a Pelosi ally. It’s widely assumed the veteran San Franciscan will be returning to her old role as House speaker. It wouldn’t be surprising if Pelosi serves until January 2020 and then retires, allowing new leadership to be in place for the 2020 election cycle.

Huffman is a progressive but smart enough not to go too far to the left and alienate his suburban base. The left in Marin and other newly blue suburbs tend to wishfully forget that suburban Democrats aren’t the same as San Francisco progressives any more than city Democrats are duplicates of Democratic voters in New York City or Chicago.

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The contest for district attorney was one of the tightest “big ticket” races Marin has seen in years. At press time, Deputy D.A. Lori Frugoli had defeated Tamalpais Valley’s Anna Pletcher by only 407 votes. This was one more election whose final result was affected by those who went to the polls but made no selection in a particular race, in this case for D.A. That’s called the undervote, and its role in election outcomes is often substantial.

Marin had an amazing 82.4 percent voter participation in the mid-term elections. That’s 132,334 voters. All could have voted in the D.A.’s race. Including 232 write-in ballots, only 114,535 of those voters chose to make a choice for Marin’s top criminal prosecutor. The undervote was 17,799, or about 13.5 percent of voters who went to the polls.

With only 410 votes separating the victorious Frugoli from second-place finisher Pletcher, if those undervote ballots had been cast for either D.A. candidate, either Pletcher could have won or Frugoli might have triumphed by a more substantial margin.